The Japan Times | NATO is endangering Earth | US military suffers Japan base setback | 170,000 metric tonnes of gold from the Global Debt Facility to use for its US Treasury-issued currency ~

Have NATO leaders created a crisis to justify NATO’s continuation after its original purpose expired?

Former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul says: “Without
U.S.-sponsored ‘regime change,’ it is unlikely that … the Malaysian
Airlines crash would have happened.” Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of
The Nation, wonders why Washington is risking war with Russia. John
Mearsheimer argues the Ukraine crisis Is the West’s fault.

William Pfaff, writing in these pages, agrees: the United States started the Ukraine crisis, which “may end in a war.”

Jan Oberg of Sweden’s Transnational Foundation holds NATO “at least
80%” responsible. Seumas Milne of The Guardian concurs: The EU “sparked
this crisis” and NATO, far from “keeping the peace … has been the cause
of escalating tension and war.”

An alliance forged against the existential Soviet threat successfully
deterred the enemy without firing a shot. But then it waged war on
Serbia which had not attacked any member state, contemptuous of a
defeated, diminished and impotent Russia.

Kosovo’s forcible detachment from Serbia in 1999 was the prelude to
taking on a more diffuse peace-maintenance role that saw NATO’s
geographical reach expand to Eastern Europe, Afghanistan and Libya. If
now it is taking on decidedly imperialist hues, are all members happy to
endorse the transmutation?

One does not know whether to admire the chutzpah or weep at the
strategic stupidity, including reversing the Nixon-Kissinger brilliance
of detaching China from Russia, of today’s Western leaders. The facts
are easily ascertainable from public sources, the double standards
obvious, the hypocrisy brazen, and the Russian response was entirely
predictable.

If, despite this, the Western publics back their governments in the
continued slide into confrontation with Russia, or the governments stay
on that path against domestic opposition as in the 2003 Iraq war, we may
rush headlong into a catastrophic war with the risk, as reminded
recently by President Vladimir Putin, of nuclear escalation.

If this sounds over the top, consider that Russia can provide
principled, strategic and relative justifications for its actions
vis-a-vis Ukraine.

On chutzpah, the countries that attacked geographically distant Iraq
in 2003 with no national security justification have the effrontery to
exclaim that attacking another country without pretext is just not done
in the 21st century. Leaders and countries yet to be held to domestic or
international criminal account for that insist that Russia and Putin
must be punished. The West may bankroll and support destabilization of
an elected pro-Russian government in Kiev, but Russia must not
destabilize a pro-West government installed by coup on its doorstep.

Circumstantial evidence points strongly but not conclusively to MH17
being shot down mistakenly by pro-Russian fighters, but not Russia
directly, with a Russian-origin missile.

In 1988, Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down by the Vincennes — not a
client but a U.S. ship — killing 290 people. The ship’s captain was
neither rebuked nor punished but awarded a medal, yet the West demands
consequences for Russia for the MH17 accident.

In 1999, NATO bombed Serbia into submission on Kosovo’s secession.
Today NATO demands Crimea be handed back to Ukraine. Part of Russia
since the 18th century, Crimea was “gifted” to Ukraine by Nikita
Khrushchev in 1954 without consulting its people. The Russians annexed
it this year after a referendum of dubious legality and accuracy.

I could support calls for a genuinely democratic referendum to
determine and respect people’s choice. But those who used military force
to dismember Serbia have no moral authority to insist Crimea must be
returned to Ukraine regardless of its people’s wishes.

The divine right of Europe’s kings to rule has not morphed into the
divine right of Westerners to determine the world’s territorial borders.

In 1962, Cuba was a sovereign state that entered into an agreement
with the then Soviet Union for stationing missiles on its territory.
This was interpreted, correctly, as a hostile act directed at the U.S.
mainland. The resulting crisis, which risked a nuclear war, was resolved
with the withdrawal of Soviet missiles. But the Eastern European
countries as sovereign states must be conceded the right to enter into a
defense alliance with the U.S. and to station NATO troops and missiles
on their territory.

On strategic idiocy: the distance from Kiev to Moscow at around 750
km is the same as from Ottawa to Washington. Imagine a pro-U.S.
government is in power in Ottawa sometime in the future despite a
massive vote against it in Quebec. China’s by then considerable economic
and strategic interests in Canada are under threat, so Chinese money
funds a Quebec-based opposition campaign on the streets of Montreal and
Ottawa, joined by Chinese officials in highly publicized acts of
solidarity.

The Canadian prime minister flees to safety in Washington, a
pro-China government is installed in Ottawa and immediately enacts
measures to take away core civic rights of non-Quebeckers. No U.S.
government would accept the outcome or be wrong to try to reverse it
using any means necessary. This is what has happened in Ukraine with
Russia.

NATO includes France and Germany. Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine,
has been the geographical gateway for some horrific invasions of Russia
in European history, including by Napoleon and Hitler. NATO has crept
steadily closer to Russia’s borders in violation of the understandings
on which post-Soviet Russia had agreed to the peaceful reunification of
Germany and to united Germany’s membership of NATO.

Undertaken in a fit of absent-mindedness without strategic hindsight
or foresight, NATO’s numerical, territorial and mission creep
progressively alienated Russia, encouraged recklessness by some East
European states and put NATO credibility on the line — without making it
stronger. Sevastopol in Crimea is the headquarters of Russia’s Black
Sea Fleet, whose loss would cut off naval access to the Mediterranean
and squeeze Russia out of the Caucasus.

It is better for Russia to fight NATO before further impoverishment
with Ukraine cut off economically and the military balance worsened.
Even if Russia is defeated, the costs of victory for the West will be
substantially higher.

For Ukraine, for reasons of geography, history, language, economics
and ethnicity, a choice between Russia and Europe is painfully
impossible.

That’s why realists like Henry Kissinger, John Mearsheimer and
Stephen Walt for months have recommended a solution that acknowledges
and respects Russia’s core strategic interests with a united but neutral
Ukraine as a buffer, a federal system with regional autonomy and
guaranteed rights for all groups.

Last November, Putin was willing to accept Ukraine having formal
economic association with both Russia and the EU, but the latter
insisted that Kiev choose one or the other. President Viktor Yanukovych
chose Russia, and the rest is history. Unfortunately the price of the
ongoing rise in global tensions and any resulting war will be paid not
just by the West but the rest of the world as well.

Ramesh Thakur is a professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University.

Opponents of a new American military base in Japan won a key victory on
Sunday. Candidates against the idea now have a majority in Noga's city
assembly, as they look to block the construction of the new facility in
the Okinawa Prefecture.

Karen Hudes says: September 8, 2014 at 9:18 am ~~Your statement that "the USGovt is left with no more options than war,
since the financial front has been lost to insolvency, market
interference, bond fraud, and leveraged corruption" is simply put,
designed to obfuscate the best option: that the US accept the offer of
170,000 metric tonnes of gold from the Global Debt Facility to use for
its US Treasury-issued currency. It is 90-95% likely that this option is
what actually happens. Shame on you, Messrs. Keiser and Willie, for
hiding this fact. https://www.facebook.com/karen.hudes.9